Bitch Media - self-promotionhttp://bitchmagazine.org/taxonomy/term/8042/0
enLady Business: On Confidence and Self-Advocacyhttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/lady-business-on-confidence-and-self-advocacy-career-advice
<p>I was thinking more about who taught me what I've learned about work after I wrote <a title="Lady Business Mariah Carey" href="/post/lady-business-who-taught-you-about-work-feminism-economics-mariah-carey%20">this post on mentoring</a>&nbsp;and wanted to share thoughts from others, too.</p>
<p>First, I want to clarify that I never meant to insinuate that women's looks don't play a role in how they're perceived in our culture or at work. I know firsthand, as a 5'11 black woman with dreads, that your physical presentation makes a difference in how you are treated. While I was a reporter in San Francisco,&nbsp;I wore business slacks and a pretty blouse to&nbsp;a function for some alumnae from the prep school I attended. I was instantly mistaken for the help at the door.</p>
<p>What you look like certainly matters. <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/05/appearance-work-pay-forbes-woman-leadership-body-weight.html">Forbes Woman has more detail on that</a>.</p>
<p>But when you're a teenager, especially a woman of color from an urban and poor setting, you are often treated as if <em>all that matters</em> is what you look like. So I consider it important in my work to remind girls (and sometimes other women) that while business fashion and professional comportment are important, getting caught up in what you look like can be a trap.</p>
<p>The mentors who taught me about work were so eager to make sure that I didn't undermine my potential to work in a variety of spaces because of my low self-esteem, we never talked about what to wear. So I wore what I had. That created some problems at Goldman Sachs when I wore pants that were too tight and was reprimanded by my boss.</p>
<ol>
<li>I hated that job anyway.</li>
<li>It took a few paychecks for me to save up and take a trip to Filene's Basement to buy better, work-appropriate clothes.</li>
</ol>
<p>And, as we know, journalists and writers are not exactly masters of style. So you can never listen to what I say about fashion. What I learned from those experiences was that I wanted to work in an environment where I could dress in step with what my colleagues were wearing—business casual is best for me, personally. But I also learned that no matter what I was wearing, I could potentially be mistaken for the help.</p>
<p>So I liked what commenters <a href="/post/lady-business-who-taught-you-about-work-feminism-economics-mariah-carey%20#comment-59180">Tahnee</a> and <a href="/post/lady-business-who-taught-you-about-work-feminism-economics-mariah-carey%20#comment-59195">Rose</a> wrote about their work experiences. They learned from men and women in their lives that confidence and self-advocacy were essential—and I completely agree.</p>
<p>Tahnee wrote that her first job was working in her aunt's jewelry shop when she was 14. "She taught me a lot, gave me confidence, and inspired me to walk in her footsteps," she wrote. Her dad, a self-employed photojournalist for 30 years, also instilled confidence. He taught her something that I think is really important for women to keep in mind: "You need to advocate for yourself—there won't always be someone there to do it for you. Especially for women—so many are too modest."</p>
<p>For a long time I was overly modest about my work and sometimes I still am. But I have male colleagues and peers who go overboard talking about themselves and their work. At the end of the day, they get better-paying and more frequent gigs because they know how to advocate for themselves. Nobody tells them that they need to pipe down because no one wants to hear it. Self-advocacy is huge.</p>
<p>Rose wrote that she still gets conflicting messages from her family about her career. This is something I've struggled with and so have some of my friends. "The loudest [message] is that they don't care about my professional aspirations and that I'll be lucky to get a job or make any money at all." I can completely relate to this.</p>
<p>My father died in 2010, but I met him at my high school graduation in 1996. He served in the military after high school, learned how to be a draftsman in the military, and worked as a civil engineer for over 40 years. He resented my education and he abhorred the idea that I wanted to be a full-time writer because it just wasn't practical and he didn't think I was any good at it.</p>
<p>"You should be a teacher or something," he said once.</p>
<p>"I was born to write," I said back, but my voice was shaking. If he didn't believe it, why did I believe it? Suddenly, I was plagued with self-doubt.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"No one was born to do anything," he responded. And that was that. I still went on to work as a reporter and to publish. But until he died, I heard his voice in my head telling me that I should do something else. It took the death of both my parents for me to follow my dreams, regardless of my own fear and the projected fear of others who discouraged me. I think we all need different catalysts to go after the things we want in business, since we all have different goals. But you'll have enough naysayers of all genders telling you can't do something. Why add your own voice to the chorus?</p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/lady-business-on-confidence-and-self-advocacy-career-advice#commentsself-empowermentself-promotionworkSocial CommentaryThu, 14 Jun 2012 18:01:56 +0000Joshunda Sanders17335 at http://bitchmagazine.orgThe Young and the Feckless: Publification and Our Comparison Compulsionhttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-young-and-the-feckless-publification-and-our-comparison-compulsion
<p><i>I feel as if my more navel gazing commentaries should come with some sort of disclaimer stating that they're not meant to be extrapolated upon, taken as universally representative of the readership's experience, etc. To that end...</i></p>
<p>I confess that I've watched the recent brouhaha over Facebook's privacy changes with some measure of baffled amusement, especially when those complaints come from my peers. Gen Yers aren't exactly known for our reticence and while I understand that there's a qualitative difference between voluntarily revealing details of your personal life and Facebook letting third parties poke around in your browsing history, the somewhat arbitrary distinctions between "good" transparency and "bad" gives me a chuckle.</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/u3419/3400263942_ee27536221.jpg" width="325" height="500" alt="3400263942_ee27536221.jpg" /><br />
Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandobean" / rel="nofollow">Brandon Milner</a></p>
<p>It's no secret that many of us in this cohort have grown up alongside the technology (cell phones, the internet, social networking) that now permeates every facet of our lives. Even if we aren't direct users, we can't escape the ways in which it reshapes social interactions and assumptions (i.e., that everyone is findable/traceable) and erodes the line between the (formerly clearly delineated) public and private spheres.</p>
<p>Hand-wringing over the consequences of the growing publicification (it's my party and I'll coin words if I want to) of our private lives is well-documented, but tends to focus on the future regrets we'll have over plastering permanent evidence of a misspent youth all over the internet and the ways in which this information could come back to haunt us in future contexts (and I'm not particularly convinced that this is the case and that a new baseline in which "indiscretions" are the norm won't emerge instead). Frankly, I'm more concerned with the here and now and the way in which we've let the connectivity of technology and the impetus to share combine into a force that compels us to compare ourselves to and judge ourselves against peers to a degree that wasn't possible even 10 or 15 years ago. Back in those bygone days (and earlier) you could legitimately fall out of touch with people. You'd graduate. They'd move. Maybe you'd hear an update from a mutual friend or when you ran into your old HS prom date's mother in line at Walgreens, but these folks were more or less out of your life. Now, there is no break, no drift. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, blogging, you can now compare yourself life milestone by milestone. And this accessibility makes it so easy to get stuck in the rut of youthful competition and anxiety. But now, instead of who's getting As, or playing first string varsity basketball or ruling the halls with popular posse in tow, it's who's finishing a PhD, getting married, backpacking through Thailand. It's all there for us to fret over, with pictures.</p>
<p>And it's not simply enough to have accumulated money and status. That's so very gauche in an 80s kinda way, isn't it? The people we most envy are the ones who are doing, achieving, living up to their potential and carving out a space for themselves. Publicification allows us to see how our peers are finding their way in the world and to compare our own journey. And even if you don't want accomplishment X, well, it's still sometimes difficult not to envy someone else for having conquered it, isn't it?</p>
<p>It's not as if previous generations didn't face the same anxiety about contributing meaningfully to society and making the very most of out their lots; they absolutely did. However, the ability to compare themselves to a global cross-section of fellow young adults at the click of a button wasn't there. You had your parents, your immediate in-person peers and far-flung folks on the tv or in the papers. You had to seek out this information. Now, you have to actively seek to avoid it.</p>
<p>It can be avoided, of course. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to click through pictures of your boyfriend's cousin's climb to Everest's base camp. And nothing says you have to wade into the masturbatory cesspool of self-aggrandizing and clique-ish hype that typifies a medium such as Twitter. But that requires no small measure of self control and a pretty robust and well-developed sense of identity. And of all of things (tongue-in-cheek and otherwise) Gen Y is known for, impulse control and disinterest in validation rarely make the list, alas.</p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-young-and-the-feckless-publification-and-our-comparison-compulsion#commentsFacebookgeneration yidentitymillennialsprivacyself-promotionsocial mediasocial statusThe Young and The FecklessTwitterSocial CommentaryWed, 05 May 2010 17:03:37 +0000J Maureen Henderson3212 at http://bitchmagazine.org